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April 7, 2013

Bill 18 and our Rights and Freedoms

In the months of fervour we’ve seen surrounding Bill 18, each side—both for and against the Bill—has seen their arguments shift and change in response to criticism. Some of this has been good, as weak and flimsy arguments have been cast aside in favour of more well-considered positions. Unfortunately, as time goes on many people have only ratcheted up the volume, falling back again and again on “gotcha” arguments and false dilemmas. Still, one argument from the anti-Bill 18 crowd has been prevalent from the start: that government-funded religious schools should, under the freedom of religion, have the right to forcibly prevent the formation of students groups they feel are in conflict with the schools’ religious moral code—namely, gay-straight alliances.

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March 3, 2013

Bill 18: A survey of the opposition

This last week I ran a short survey canvassing opinions on Manitoba’s Bill 18. I’ve received 85 responses. I’m not an expert at statistics, so I’ve made the results publicly available in case anyone wants to take issue with any of the conclusions I’m going to draw.

The survey, carried out through the “Citizens concerned about Bill 18” Facebook group, was targeted at those who opposed the Bill and live in Steinbach and the surrounding area. Right off the bat, there are two general statistics you should know in order to frame these results. First, 73% of those who filled out the survey said that they do not support Bill 18 as it is currently written. This is not surprising—this survey was specifically aimed at those who opposed the Bill. In actuality, support for Bill 18 in Manitoba has been almost unanimous. According to various sources, Bill 18 has been almost a non-issue outside of the Steinbach area. Only a single school (as far as I know) has released a statement opposing the Bill, while several schools (including the entirety of the Hanover School Division, which encompasses Steinbach and the surrounding towns) have made statements supporting the Bill. (It’s been pointed out that since I started writing this article, several other schools have also spoken out, including Calvin Christian School and the principals of Linden Christian School and Brandon’s Christian Heritage School)

The second interesting statistic is that slightly over half of the people who responded think that Bill 18 will be struck down. Again, this doesn’t at all jive with what I’ve been hearing from various sources. According to Manitoba’s Education Minister, Nancy Allan, the Bill faces almost no threat whatsoever (saying “There will be no compromise on that. We feel strongly that all students deserve to be in a safe and caring learning environment,” and “At the end of the day, I’m not going to let faith-based schools opt out of providing a safe and caring environment for their students.”). The opposition has been vocal, but is comprised of only a very, very tiny segment of the population.

The good news from the survey: very few people directly contradicted themselves. The majority of people who said that the main problem with Bill 18 was its vague definition of “bullying” also said that were this definition clarified, they would back the Bill. 23% of the people who responded would pass the Bill if it contained a clearer definition; another 13% would pass the Bill if the Bill added protection for people being bullied because of their religious beliefs.

That still leaves a large group that opposed the Bill for another reason: they believe that private schools should have the right to discriminate against certain groups of students in accordance to the schools’ religious beliefs.

The meat of the survey was a series of five statements.

If you believe that schools have the right to disallow student groups that conflict with the school’s religious beliefs, which of the following do you think should be allowed?

  • A private Christian school disallowing gatherings of LGBTQ students
  • A private Christian school disallowing gatherings of students who are members of other religions
  • A private secular school disallowing gatherings of Christian students
  • A private Mormon school disallowing gatherings of Christian students
  • A private Mormon school disallowing gatherings of black students

My objective was to pinpoint exactly where this line is drawn—at what point does the schools’ right override the students’, and vice-versa? I hoped these questions would make for some interesting results, and I was right.

Identifying the threat

Right off the bat, 30% of those who responded to the question said that Christian schools should have the right to ban LGBTQ groups (LGBTQ being a blanket term for every person who identifies themselves as anything other than strictly heterosexual), and that’s it. At first glance, this honestly surprised me. A Muslim-Christian alliance? Protected. Gay-Straight alliance? Banned. It seems very strange for people to argue that the threat was forcing schools to allow groups that conflicted with their own beliefs, and you would think that students of other religions would be at the top of that list.

Also somewhat surprising was a pretty stunning double-standard: out of all the people who said that a Christian school should have the right to ban gatherings of students belonging to other religions, 30% of them turned around and said that a Mormon school should not have the right to ban Christian groups. It’s the exact same question phrased two different ways: should a religious institution be allowed to ban gatherings of students of another religion? The answer for that 30%: yes, as long as it isn’t mine. That number jumps to over 50% if it was a private secular school instead of a private Mormon school.

The question

The final statement of the batch is the most telling. Out of all the people who argued that a Christian school should have the right to ban LGBTQ groups, only 10% of them said that a Mormon school should have the right to ban gatherings of black students.

You’re probably going to have one of two reactions to this number: either this isn’t a big deal, or it is. And that reaction is the linchpin of the Bill 18 debate. The reason is this: for the majority of the opponents of Bill 18—90% of them—these are two entirely different questions. But for the majority of the LGBTQ-friendly population, these two questions are, in practise, identical.

The common question is this: can a private religious school discriminate against a group that is at odds with their religious beliefs, even though that specific group’s right to gather is a protected human right?

Conservative Mormonism teaches that black skin is caused by sin—it’s taken many, many years for black people to achieve acceptance within the Mormon church, and there are still holdouts against it. The majority of Mormons would dismiss this belief as archaic and untrue. But within certain groups, this is a deeply held religious belief.

Conservative Christianity teaches that any sexual orientation other than “straight” is a sinful perversion—it’s taken many, many years for LGBTQ people to achieve acceptance within the Christian church, and there are still holdouts against it. The majority of Christians would dismiss this belief as archaic and untrue. But within certain groups, this is a deeply held religious belief.

For many of us, these are almost identical situations. Both are religious institutions discriminating against a protected people group, a group defined by genetic predisposition rather than choice. Of course, not everyone agrees with that:

The question about a private Mormon school disallowing gatherings of black students is a different issue because we’re dealing with choices (Anonymous)

…but that’s not a generally accepted view. We have a pretty good understanding of sexual orientation, and generally people “choose” to be LGBTQ in the same sense that people “choose” to be straight: it isn’t really a choice at all, and I’m sure many of the LGBTQ students in Steinbach, as sad as it is, wish they could choose to be otherwise.

In the greater population, race and sexual orientation are viewed as extremely similar traits and are equally protected. The major differences between race and sexual orientation is that sexual orientation is something that can be malleable, but more importantly, that sexual orientation is something that can be concealed: you can refrain from broadcasting your orientation, but you cannot do the same about your race. This makes discrimination easier to justify against sexual orientation—the majority of the time these people aren’t being asked to not be gay, they’re simply being asked to refrain from broadcasting that fact.

Even among conservative Christians it’s generally accepted that your sexual orientation isn’t something that you can simply choose to change. Instead, conservative Christians have moved to paint the practise of orientation as being separate from the orientation itself. Recently, this has come up again and again as what Christians refer to as not having a problem with “orientation”, but with “lifestyle”:

Christians do not believe that people who are gay are bad, and are not taught to hate gay people, but love them, they believe that it is the lifestyle that is bad and they hate the lifestyle that gay people practise. This is where some people get confused, and hate the person, and not only the lifestyle. (Abe Wiebe)

The problem of the 90%

So, what does this all mean?

Mostly importantly, I believe that this means that the debate over Bill 18 is not, as Steinbach Christian High School and Southland Church would like to argue, about religious freedom or the definition of “bullying”. People don’t truly believe that religious schools should be allowed to freely discriminate against groups of students based solely on their deeply-held beliefs. And any discussion of the Bill lands us squarely back in the LGBTQ-rights debate.

And here’s the problem: we won’t agree, and odds are if you’re opposed to Bill 18 you don’t agree with a number of the things I’ve written above, despite how factual I think the things I wrote are. We won’t agree because, ultimately, this is more a LGBTQ-rights debate than anything else, and that’s a debate that’s drowning in opinions, emotions, and religious dogmas. At least one person has accused me of “playing the race card” instead of making a real argument, without understanding that for the majority of us the fight for the acceptance of minority racial groups and the fight for the the acceptance of the LGBTQ population really is the exact same thing, and we believe that our opponents are simply those who are standing on the wrong side of history.

And that’s it. That’s the stalemate. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the discussion, because this is a problem that pits religious dogma against fundamental human rights. It’s an argument over whether or not religious beliefs can trump human rights—and rest assured, these are the definition of human rights. In Manitoba, these issues fall under not only the federal Human Rights Act, but Manitoba’s own Human Rights Code, assented into law in 1987. According to Manitoba’s local Code, Manitoba recognizes that:

  • implicit in the above principle is the right of all individuals to be treated in all matters solely on the basis of their personal merits, and to be accorded equality of opportunity with all other individuals;
  • to protect this right it is necessary to restrict unreasonable discrimination against individuals, including discrimination based on stereotypes or generalizations about groups with whom they are or are thought to be associated, and to ensure that reasonable accommodation is made for those with special needs;
  • in view of the fact that past discrimination against certain groups has resulted in serious disadvantage to members of those groups, and therefore it is important to provide for affirmative action programs and other special programs designed to overcome this historic disadvantage;
  • much discrimination is rooted in ignorance and education is essential to its eradication, and therefore it is important that human rights educational programs assist Manitobans to understand all their fundamental rights and freedoms, as well as their corresponding duties and responsibilities to others; and
  • these various protections for the human rights of Manitobans are of such fundamental importance that they merit paramount status over all other laws of the province.

And in part 2, it’s been placed into law that the Code applies to gender identity and sexual orientation.

This is why the fight over Bill 18 is so important, so heated, and why it won’t end when Bill 18 inevitably passes into law. What Bill 18 proposes, and what the opposition is so against, are basic human rights that have already been ratified at both the federal and provincial level. And when religious dogma and human rights are at odds with each other, there’s always going to be trouble.

Comment [27]

February 25, 2013

Bill 18 and the right to discrimination

If you’re a Christian living in Manitoba, your voice needs to be heard.

The Manitoba government is attempting to pass Bill 18, a school anti-bullying Bill. Under this Bill, it would be a crime to bully children because of their gender, their race, their disabilities, or their sexual orientation. But many conservative Christians in southern Manitoba—specifically the Steinbach area—have been extremely vocal against this Bill. Specifically, the Steinbach Christian High School has been rallying people to fight the Bill, arguing that their religious beliefs conflict with the right of their students to be protected against bullying. Keep in mind that this Bill does nothing to change what is taught in schools; it was specifically written solely to prevent student minority groups from bullying, either from other students or from the school itself. You can read the Bill in its entirety here.

Many Christians in Manitoba treat the freedom of religion as if it’s their own personal weapon to wield, but the reality is that the freedom of religion exists to protect us from our own discrimination. Discrimination is not a protected right. If you want to say “Christian schools shouldn’t have to allow pro-gay groups” (because, let’s be honest, that’s why this backlash is about) you must immediately follow that with “secular schools shouldn’t have to allow Christian groups.” Privately, people can do whatever they’d like—as a Canadian citizen, you’re allowed to participate in racism, sexism, and homophobia, but you cannot receive government support for doing so.

The question I’d pose is this: Opponents of Bill 18 argue that a religion’s right to discrimination—as a deeply held belief—should override a student’s right to be protected from that discrimination. But the Christians in opposition to the Bill are looking through a very narrow viewfinder. Mormonism teaches that black skin is caused by sin. Would you support a school with a Mormon administration in their decision to disallow gatherings of black students? Would you support a school with an administration dominated by Atheists if they decided that Christian students shouldn’t be allowed to gather?

Bill 18 is a protection of these rights. Fighting Bill 18 is fighting against the very protection that allows Christians to gather at schools. It’s amazing that the opponents of the Bill are so incredibly blinded to that just because they see the words “sexual orientation” in the Bill, as if those words were part of some sort of secret agenda. Yes, the government does have an agenda, and it is this: don’t allow schools to bully kids, regardless of how much they think those kids deserve to be bullied. The backlash against the Bill only serves as proof that, sadly, it’s a Bill we need.

Yesterday, 1200 people gathered in Steinbach to say that their right to discriminate was more important a student’s right to be free from that discrimination. If you’re a Christian, you need to speak up. Too many kids have already committed suicide to escape the exact sort of bullying that this vocal group is advocating. If you have a single drop of love in your body, you’ll fight this hate. What I can do from here is fairly limited, so please, do what you can.

Comment [20]

February 7, 2013

OSX: An exercise in bad UI design

So, Patrick wanted to know why I tend to refer to OSX as a poorly-designed interface. He asked me to write a blog post about it. I drank too much tea, stayed up way too late, and BAM, did exactly that.

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January 12, 2013

Book report: 2012

In 2011 I read two, maybe three books total. Maybe one? I don’t actually remember. Two major things have happened that has changed that. One, Caitlin bought me a Kobo for Christmas last year, which has been a godsend. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, someone who is friends with me, or a psychic, you know that I have eye issues that make reading somewhat difficult. Having a Kobo changed that — it’s easy on the eyes and lets me set up the fonts just right so I can tear through books pretty quickly. I also got new glasses, which (further) sacrifice my distance vision in order to make my near vision better. These have also been wonderful.

As a result, in 2012 I read at least 14 books, totalling 5,745 pages. This year I also set a new record for how much I’ve written in a single year — in addition to a handful of short excerpts and failed short stories, I wrote about 120,000 words across two manuscripts, or about 480 pages. One of those has been abandoned permanently — the other I’m still working on in earnest and hope to finish the first draft in the next month.

Anyway, here’s an index I’ve the books I read this year. Spoiler alert: the best books I read this year were We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson), Ready Player One (Ernest Cline), This Book is Full of Spiders (David Wong), and One Bloody Thing After Another (Joey Comeau).

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. 160 pages.
★★★★★

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami. 944 pages.
★☆☆☆☆, with prejudice

Masters of Doom, by David Kushner. 368 pages.
★★★☆☆

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. 384 pages.
★★★★★

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. 1024 pages.
★★★☆☆

The Serpent and the Rainbow, by Wade Davis. 304 pages.
★★★★☆

Perfect Circle, by Sean Stewart. 243 pages.
★★★★☆

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, by Anna Anthropy. 208 pages.
★★★☆☆

One Bloody Thing After Another, by Joey Comeau. 160 pages.
★★★★★

Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan. 480 pages.
★★★★☆

John Dies at the End, by David Wong. 480 pages.
★★★★☆

Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. 304 pages.
★★★★☆

This Book is Full of Spiders, by David Wong. 416 pages.
★★★★★

Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link. 272 pages.
★★★★☆ (with ★★★★★ for the actual story “Magic for Beginners”, which is one of the best short stories I’ve read in years)

Comment [3]

October 27, 2012

1- and 2-star reviews of Sigur Ros from Amazon

This album is not even mediocre- it’s simply bad. After about three songs I just couldn’t take it anymore. The high pitched distorted voices in the background have the same disturbing effect as a mosquito buzzing in your ear. The melodies are very plane and lack sophistication. It almost sounds like a child toying with a piano, repetitively playing the same four random keys. Don’t buy it.

Utter trash. Just what is this suppose to be, music to get annoyed by? This Cd has no redeeming quality wahtsoever. Its like listening to a cat being tortured. Pass it up at all costs! You’ll be glad you did.

I listened to this two times, and I really wanted to like it. But it’s just crap, and I couldn’t stand to listen to it ever again.

I really wanted to like this. I heard so many good things about this band that I was really curious to see what all the hype was about. But for the same reasons that I completely hate jazz, I hate this as well: it is completely pompus B.S. It resembles something that belongs in my grandmothers collection than mine. Complete elevator music. Boring.

Sigur Ros ruin it all with smarmy, pretentious, overdramatic, and feminine sounding vocals. The music is hard to take seriously with that terrible crooning all over the place. At least it’s all gibberish and you can’t understand what he’s saying. Either they should go instrumental or find a woman if they want feminine vocals.

This has got to be the most overrated load of hooey since “Kid A.” There’s nothing memorable here; the music’s not even that interesting. I thought maybe a second listen might help, but no.

Why do people who can hardly tolerate this, (like me) compare it to Kid A, which is one of the greatest albums of all time (nat’l anthem, morning bell, IDIOTEQUE, optimistic) HELLO PEOPLE?!?!?!?

I’m sorry to disagree with some of these 5 star reviews this is getting. Everytime I hear one of their songs, I worry about that friend of mine that cuts her wrists just to feel the pain. This sounds like something I would be afraid to play near an old folks home because the tennants would think it’s time to go to the next life.

Comment

October 18, 2012

A list of artists I want to attempt a cover of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill"
  • Joanna Newsom
  • Owen Pallett
  • Florence & The Machine
  • The National
  • Iron & Wine
  • Emiliana Torrini
  • Jonsi

Comment [2]